[holografix]

Oh the LAN party... Me and my mates in Rio, around '99, would carry our PC towers, monitors, and backpacks of cables, keyboards and tech paraphernalia to our one of our apartments in Ipanema and set up wherever we could. There'd be maybe 4-6 of us.

We'd spend maybe 4 hours trying to get all pcs "visible" to other pcs on the Windows network. At first we used coaxial cables and T plugs with a terminator at the last computer, what a nightmare. Then eventually I think someone brought a switcher and we used the regular rj-45s.

We still talk about epic Starcraft battles, insane coop quake run throughs and the day Diablo II came out and we played 12 straight!

Usually at the end, in the early Saturday or Sunday morning we'd go get a cheap breakfast go home to get changed and meet back up at the beach to debrief last night's shenanigans.

[ulrikrasmussen]

This reminds me so much of my own youth, except for the beach debriefing :). Especially the 4 hours trying to get all computers to "see" each other brings back memories. I remember a particularly puzzling problem where my computer and a friend's computer were unable to communicate directly, but could otherwise talk to everyone else. After half a weekend, we found out that the on-board network devices on our motherboards (which were identical brand and model, ordered from the same place) had been manufactured with identical MAC addresses. After all the black magic that we had applied to the problem, without luck, throughout the LAN, it gave a great sense of joy and relief to fix the problem by simply spoofing the MAC and changing one digit :). We had an epic 8 hour long Age of Empires session afterwards ...

[holografix]

I can't imagine how you guys eventually found that out! We usually resorted to abandoning Windows Network and just hoping we could ping everyone and "see" each other's servers hosted on a computer. Often computer A and B could see C but couldn't see each other. Never ending mess of installing/removing tcp/ip and the other LAN protocols and fudging around with ip addresses etc!! Took forever but when it worked and that first game started rolling everyone was up

[ulrikrasmussen]

I was very fascinated by networks and network protocols back then, so often at LANs I would play around with a tool called "netXray" which could capture network packets (basically a proprietary equivalent of Wireshark).

I could spend a lot of time trying to decipher the data that games would send on the network, and I also tried to mess with my friends by replaying modified UDP packets (rarely had an effect, though). As far as I remember, I found the MAC address issue while playing around with netXray :).

[eterm]

I remember from one university lan party (c. 2004) that there were 6-7 people who just wanted to play C&C:generals as well as some who would rather be playing UT2K3 but then that group overlapped with a couple of people who had insistent on turning up with linux (slackware? Gentoo?) boxes and hadn't got them fully working yet.

Then after a while a few from the 6-7 playing generals get bored, realise they don't have UT downloaded, so they head over to that guy who doesn't seem to play games but just shares files and watches movies to get the discs from him. He's happy amusing himself watching supertroopers for the 15th time and oblivious to the fact that it's 3 hours in and so far only 2 games of generals have managed to happen.

UT2K3 is huge (for the time), there's only one set of DVDs so while it's shared around the network is going slow as shit because everyone is piped into a single hub, but eventually after an hour or so the laggers manage to finish downloading and installing it.

By which time the people who started on UT2K3 are bored because they had envisaged an epic 6v6 with vehicles and instead had to settle for a fairly lame 3 man deathmatch, where one guy was so much better and couldn't help but dominate the other two.

So the linux nerds and slow installers (the games we'd be playing were published well in advance, please make sure you're bought up and fully patched) finally finish installing and then updating their installs and find that no one really wants to keep playing, but a larger game with vehicles does finally get under way.

"Starcraft is small, what about starcraft?" pipes up one unfortunate who's just suggesting that because his computer is too slow to actually run anything more modern. "Nah, but I've got WC3" someone else more helpfully says, but starcraft guy doesn't want to clear out his 2GB of pr0n to make space for that.

And this was in the days where getting ethernet working wasn't really problematic.

[lordnacho]

>>We'd spend maybe 4 hours trying to get all pcs "visible" to other pcs on the Windows network.

Me too! It was only when I did a CCNA that it occurred to me why you can't just give every machine an arbitrary IP like 1.2.3.4 and 5.6.7.8. And the mystery of what "Subnet Mask" meant caused a few facepalms as well.

[jug]

"Did you all double check so that WINS is enabled??"